Spectacle and the Inviolate Body
Human violence against the non-human body was the antithesis of the sacrality accorded to the human body. The human body was inviolate. It was a protected space. A man's honour, the public manifestation of the inviolate body, was thus a protected space.
A man's home, and especially the women who dwelt there, were the non-public site of the inviolate body and so were protected space. In the urban settings of the Abbasid caliphate (750-1258), this notion of protected inviolability was also thought to extend to semi-public spaces like the market place, the cemetery and the mosque. In this way, violence inflicted on the body becomes both an unveiling, as exposure of the body as protected space, and an inscribing of shame, as manifestation of the loss of inviolability.Al-Jahiz, On the Upstarts
Reverence for the sacrality of the body is a major theme of a work by the Basran intellectual and theologian al-Jahiz (d. 868/9), whose association with the caliphal court in Baghdad and Samarra lasted for some five decades. His Fi al-Nabitah (On the Upstarts) is the preface to a lost composition, his On the Arabs and their Clients (which presumably dealt with the culture wars concerning the respective merits of Arab and non-Arab accomplishments).[1135] The work begins with a brief history of the disintegration of the creedal unity of the Islamic community. This is a history told through acts of violence wrought on protected spaces, except that this time the spaces are the bodies of sacred persons, i.e., caliphs and key members of the Prophet's family. Al- Jahiz begins with the assassination of the third caliph, ‘Uthman (r. 644-56):
‘Uthman (God be pleased with him!) was assassinated and violated. He was hit with weapons, his stomach pierced with lances, his jugular slit with arrow heads and his skull cracked open with staves, even though he did not lift a finger to protect himself...
He was violated: his womenfolk were beaten in his presence and men burst into his private quarters. His wife removed her veil and lifted her skirts in an attempt to restrain his assailants and break their resolve. She tried to shield ‘Uthman with her hands and had two fingers cut off. He was violated: they jumped on his ribs, and dragged and tossed his dead body, naked, on the dung heap - the butchered remains of the man considered by God's Prophet (God bless and cherish him!) a fit match for his daughters, unmarried women and cherished womenfolk.[1136]The outrage consists in the violation of the three protected spaces: body, home (and womenfolk), honour. For al-Jahiz this outrage is by extension an act of violence on the memory of the Prophet.
Or take al-Jahiz's condemnation of how the Umayyad caliph Yazid ibn Mu‘awiya (r. 680-3) attacked Mecca, bombarded the Ka‘ba, violated the sanctuary of Medina, and in 680 murdered al-Husayn ibn ‘Ali, the son of the caliph ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, surrounded by his household, when al-Husayn had refused to pledge the oath of allegiance to Yazid:[1137]
Yazid rammed his sceptre in the mouth of al-Husayn. He transported the daughters of God's Prophet, in full view, uncovered, upon packsaddles with no curtains, tied to the backs of restive camels. He exposed the genitals of his son ‘Ali ibn al-Husayn, when his legal majority was a matter of doubt, with the intention of killing him if it was discovered that he had grown pubic hair, and, if not, of carting him away in exactly the same way that the commander of the Muslim army carts the captured children of polytheists away.
For al-Jahiz, outrages such as these were made much worse by the collusion of those believers who did nothing to prevent them.
Ibn al-Rumi's Funeral Ode for Basra
A similar set of concerns for protected spaces forms the focus of Ibn al-Rumi's (d. 896) funeral lament for Basra, sacked by Zanj slaves in 871 during their rebellion led by an ‘Alid pretender, ‘Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad, who claimed he was the Mahdi.
(The Zanj were slaves of East African origin who were forced to work in the plantations of southern Iraq. Their rebellion lasted from 870 to 883.) In this long poem of eighty-three verses, Ibn al-Rumi gives voice to his grief at the violation of Basra.21 He describes how families were killed in their homes, but his plaint is at its most anguished when he describes the fate of the womenfolk in verses 23-4 and 26-8:So many young virgins, God's seal intact exposed, unveiled by them in public!
So many chaste young maidens enslaved, left with nothing to hide their faces.
Did any of you see how they were herded
in captivity, bleeding head to toe?
Did any of you see how the Zanj
Narrative of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 59-94. History is even less comfortable when a caliph decides to act as executioner - it is possible that these acts are so beyond the pale that they are left by and large unrecorded. We know of three possible cases: al-Ma'mun's execution of the Abbasid contender Ibn ‘A'ishah, al-Wathiq's botched attempt at beheading Nasr ibn Ahmad, and Abd al-Rahman III's ritual sacrifice of his son. See (respectively) John Nawas, ‘Abbasid state violence and the execution of Ibn ‘A'isha', in Gleave and Kristo-Nagy, Violence in Islamic Thought, pp. 128-41; James E. Montgomery, Al-Jahiz: In Praise of Books (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 24-5; Maribel Fierro, ‘Emulating Abraham: The Fatimid al-Qa'im and the Umayyad Abd al-Rahman III', in Christian Lange and Maribel Fierro (eds.), Public Violence in Islamic Societies: Power, Discipline and the Construction of the Public Sphere, yth-igth Centuries ce (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 130-55.
21 Arabic text with English translation: A. J. Arberry, Arabic Poetry: A Primer for Students (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 62-73.
surrounded them and cast lots for them?
Did any of you see them taken as slaves, those women accustomed to being waited on and served?
Ibn al-Rumi's poem, like al-Jahiz's treatise, is fuelled by outrage that there was no one to defend the victims (verses 29-30):
My heart burns at the thought of what the Zanj did!
What a bitter insult.
I am in so much pain at the thought of what the Zanj did!The threnody ends, in verses 72-83, with an appeal for vengeance, for it is not Basra that has been violated, but the caliphate and the Islamic community.
The ruling elite, in order to inflict violence as a way of seeking to control its subject populations, used the violation of the protected body as spectacle to drive home the message that its rule of the body politic was realised through the disciplining of the bodies of its subject population. At various times and places, ruling elites inflicted the following punishments on subject populations, offenders and enemies: flogging; crucifixion - both ante-mortem crucifixion and the post-mortem gibbeting of bodies; the mutilation and exposure of naked corpses in semi-public spaces such as the market place or above the entrances to shops and houses, as well as in public spaces such as city gates; banishment; decapitation; the blackening of faces; removal of facial hair, especially the beard; ignominious parades through mosques, markets and streets in shame; the bestialisation of humans through contagious exposure to non-human animals; glossectomy; and possibly even the ritual slaughter of humans as if they were sacrificial animals.
The spectacle of violence (however achieved) effectively demarcated the public sphere and declared that sphere a possession of a ruling elite. The performance of the spectacle was meant to act as deterrent and thus effect social cohesion. Depending on time and place, these spectacles of violence could be ritualised as symbolic manifestations of divine justice, and they were often performed with arrogated eschatological meanings, either as anticipations of God's punishment of the damned or as harbingers of a messianic 22 age.
The ruling elites may have been able to control the infliction of violence as spectacle at the moment of its enacting, but how such spectacles lived on in the collective memory was quite another matter, as the following two cases
22 See Christian Lange and Maribel Fierro, ‘Introduction: Spatial, Ritual and Representational Aspects of Public Violence in Islamic Societies (7th-19th Centuries ce)', in Lange and Fierro, Public Violence, pp.
1-23. illustrate. The first is the flogging of the holy man Ibn Hanbal (d. 855). The second is the crucifixion of the vizier Ibn Baqiyya in 977.The Flogging of Ibn Hanbal
Ahmad ibn Hanbal devoted his life to emulating what he understood to be the lifestyle of Prophet Muhammad. It was a life of self-denial, of scrupulous avoidance of anything tainted, and of devotion to learning, for in order to understand how the Prophet lived Ibn Hanbal was convinced that he had to acquire and learn as many of the Prophet's sayings and accounts of his deeds (known in Arabic as the Hadith) as he could muster. It was, he held, crucial to accumulate Hadith because this could guarantee that a believer would not have recourse to the application of reason (which was unreliable) to fill in any gaps in his knowledge of how the Prophet might have acted in any given context.
Not surprisingly, such a commitment to the avoidance of a lifestyle built upon reason attracted the attention of al-Ma'mun (d. 833), a caliph very much given to the application of reason. Al-Ma'mun had set up a process known as the Inquisition (Mihnah), a caliphal scrutiny into private belief, a process whereby judges, notary witnesses, and scholars of Hadith were quizzed on an item of belief that could only be answered on the basis of the application of reason: whether God had created the Qur'an. (Many believers held that the Qur'an was the word of God and thus enjoyed a special ontological status.) The caliph had Ibn Hanbal detained for questioning but died before Ibn Hanbal could testify.
In September 835, Ibn Hanbal was summoned before al-Ma'mun's successor, the caliph al-Mu‘tasim (d. 842), and asked to declare the createdness of the Qur'an. Ibn Hanbal steadfastly refused because he knew of no verse of the Qur'an or no Hadith that declared the Qur'an was created. In the end he received a flogging. There is disagreement about whether he did capitulate or not.
The afterlife of this incident can hardly be exaggerated.
Some three centuries after the event, the Hadith scholar Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1200) wrote a remarkable biography of Ibn Hanbal. One of its highlights is chapter 69, the heroic tale of Ibn Hanbal's trial, and it makes for fascinating reading.[1138] Ibn Hanbal was transmogrified by his supporters into the archetype of pious commitment to the ideals of authentic Islam. The flogging became a testimony to the foundational truths of the community and Ibn Hanbal became the representative of an uncompromising devotion to the lifestyle of the Prophet (the Sunnah in Arabic) and the eponym of the Hanbali school of law. His memory was thus instrumental in the emergence of the version of Islam today known as Sunnism.The Crucifixion of Ibn Baqiyya
During the emirate of the Buyids (a dynasty of warlords of Iranian origin who came from the Daylam region on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea), when their power was at its apogee, Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Baqiyya served as vizier to the amir ‘Izz al-Dawla (d. 977). Ibn Baqiyya had risen from a position in the amir's kitchen to the highest office, that of the vizierate, but made a fatal mistake. He advised his master to wage war against his cousin ‘Adud al-Dawla (d. 983). ‘Izz al-Dawla was defeated, had Ibn Baqiyya blinded and put him under house arrest until he handed him over to ‘Adud al-Dawla. The victor had elephants crush Ibn Baqiyya to death and his body gibbeted.
Ibn Baqiyya had been a patron of Ibn al-Anbari, a notary-witness. Moved by the fate of his patron, Ibn al-Anbari composed a lament and circulated it through the streets of Baghdad. The poem, in which crucifixion is magically transformed into a spectacle of victory, was so powerful and moving that ‘Adud al-Dawla is said to have wished that he and not Ibn Baqiyya had been crucified and to have remunerated Ibn al-Anbari handsomely for his composition. Clearly the poem made ‘Adud al-Dawla only too conscious of the ephemerality of the punishment. A century or so later the theologian and language-expert Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. 1078), who quotes many verses of the poem in his Asrar al-Balaghah (The Secrets of Rhetoric), had this to say of the poem:
We all agree that in this world there is no form of exemplary punishment or public chastisement more shameful and repulsive, more effective and terrifying than the sight of a person killed and then gibbeted on the trunk of a tree. No sight is more likely to move our souls to disapproval, to fill our hearts with distress, or force us to beseech God for deliverance from such an awful and dire fate. Yet consider the lament Abu al-Hasan al-Anbari composed for Ibn Baqiyya when he was gibbeted. Contemplate the magic his craftsmanship produces by transforming the sheer loathsomeness of gibbeting into its very opposite through figures and tropes that fill you with wonder.[1139]
Any legitimacy that may have accrued to ruling elites through the spectacle of violence was transient and ephemeral, fixed as it was to the moment of death. The violent spectacles that lived on in the collective memory were remembered, not as legitimate acts of public discipline, but as violations of the protected space of the body, as offences against the sacredness of the person.